


The One Where Bond Saves Q's Life

by dontkeepmehere



Category: Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-01-13
Updated: 2013-02-05
Packaged: 2017-11-25 08:54:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/637191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dontkeepmehere/pseuds/dontkeepmehere
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for an anonymous prompt: <i> The reason Q Joined MI6 is because 007 saved his life when he was a kid. </i></p>
<p>Bond was prepared for his early missions with the SIS to be somewhat dull, he didn't anticipate being left to guard a too-smart teenager.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CathrineMcCord](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CathrineMcCord/gifts).



> For the wonderful **CathrineMcCord** for her help and support.

Being ‘gifted’ certainly had its pitfalls. Q was declared to be a gifted child when he was four years old now a decade later he’s still struggling with the diagnosis. Q’s intelligence defined every aspect of his life: his studies, his free time, his awful relationship with his parents, even the name Q was derived from I _Q_. Now Q’s designation as exceptionally gifted was about to get him killed.

Q’s lying on his front on his bed trying not to think about the probability that he was going to die. He knows the probability of death is 100%, a certainty, but the probability of dying when you were fourteen from a paid bullet to the head ought be much smaller than it currently was. Q’s focused on his university paper on Cantor’s discoveries regarding the comparative size of infinities and so he’s not overly concerned with his own mortality until someone coughs.

“Shut up!” Q snaps glancing up from his paper to throw a glare at the man that was sprawled in the armchair in the corner of Q’s London bedroom. The man’s wearing a well cut suit and seems comfortable in it despite the fact that Q keeps his room absurdly warm and the man’s clearly wearing a shoulder holster. “I am working.”

“So am I.”

“My work is more important and I prefer to work in silence so please shut up or leave.”

“I can’t leave.”

“Clearly you can. You mean you won’t leave because you’ve only just joined the service and you don’t want to be kicked out for leaving your target alone.”

“Shut up.”

“Rude,” Q mutters as he turns back to his computer screen. Hardly taking his eyes of the screen Q reaches out behind him to grab one of the many books that are dispersed across the bed. His bed is an utter mess with vague notes and half finished mathematics calculations on lose sheets of paper falling everywhere. Copying something from the book into his paper the boy tosses the book behind him again and begins to reread his paragraph from the beginning.

It’s not his best work. Q’s snarls at his computer screen and thrusts the lid closed in anger.

He couldn’t do  _anything_. He couldn’t focus on his reading, writing his paper wasn't coming as easily as it usually did, he did not want to practice piano. He just could not do anything and it was driving him insane.

“Calm down.”

“Fuck off!” Q screams as he jumps of the bed. “Just fuck off! Just – just –“ Q let’s out a cry again and stamps, actually stamps the floor in frustration. “Do you have any idea how frustrating it is to have everything come effortlessly, every single thing, except family? No one’s given a fuck about me for years and now my father somehow manages to get himself killed and my world’s falling apart because I’m related to him. Do you know how it feels to know that this is the one thing you absolutely can not fix?”

“No. I’m an orphan.”

“Well I halfway there,” Q mutters as he begins to clear his mess of papers from his bed. Cleaning was calming. If he could just focus on the cleaning he would be fine. “And my mother apparently can not make it to London before Thursday, although she lives two and a half hours away, so I’m stuck with you for the next two days.”

“I’m stuck with you too.”

“You joined the SIS what, three months ago? Four? Did you think you were going to be thrown in with Russia spies right from the beginning?”

“How do you-?” Bond began before falling silent turning to stare out of the window.

“Always the same question. You were introduced as Commander Bond, plus you look naval. It’s not impossible to find the details of your celebrated naval career, I do have a computer you know.”

“Are all fourteen year olds this annoying?” Bond snaps as he moves out the bedroom towards the kitchen. Q shouts after him.

“No. Only the _exceptionally gifted_ ones.”

Bond sets about making himself a cup of coffee. He’s careful and methodical in the hopes that it will make the annoying little f-  _boy_  disappear. He heats a kettle of water before moving to the expensive coffee beans the banker has kept around. Bond spoons a portion of beans into the blender and blitzes them into a fine powder, Bond can’t abide instant coffee, and then pours this into the small cafetière. He lets the coffee steep for a minute before he realises that he cannot hear Q’s irate mumblings from the bedroom anymore.

He rushes into the bedroom and pulls his Walther instinctively. Something is wrong. He knows it.

“Q, ensuite now,” he looks like he might argue but after a brief hesitation Q moves to the ensuite and shuts the door. “Lock it. Don’t open it.”

Bond had seen something. He’s new to the field and not as finely focused as one needs to be. He’s seen something on the roof of the building opposite when he was staring out the window earlier.

There’s no sense in trying to be covert, if there’s someone watching him they’ve already seen the Walther and Q’s dash out of the room. Bond moves to the window and looks up at the building. He’s right; there was someone there. It wasn’t a mounted rifle though as Bond had anticipated. They must be surveillance; people were coming for them. People who presumably thought they could handle an inexperienced SIS agent.  

* * *

Q’s huddled against the toilet bowl on the floor of his ensuite bathroom. He can hear gunshots. Q can hear groans of pain and expensive furniture breaking.  Q is certain he’s going to die.

He can’t calculate the probability. There are too many variables. Q can’t even tell how many operatives are out there. Or how many guns and knives there are.

Q thinks it’s upwards of 96%. The odds aren’t in his favour.

He hugs himself closer to the toilet because he feels physically sick. He is going to die.

He’s fourteen, he’s only just started university and he’s going to die. In the bathroom of his London bedroom, Q is going to die.

Then it goes quiet.

There’s a final gunshot, it’s aimed at the lock of the bathroom door.

Q looks up to the doorway. Bond is standing there holding his Walther out, a phone is pressed to his ears.

“Target secure,” Bond says before he rings off the phone.  Q can hardly breathe because maybe just maybe he is going to live. He swears that if he does he’s joining the SIS.   


	2. Chapter 2

Bond’s company was intermittent for the next two days. Although no one talked to Q about the incident it didn’t take an exceptionally gifted teenager to gather that the man had been pulled out of the field to file reports about the attack, the necessity of neutralising two hostiles whilst on a simple protection assignment, the almost fatal oversight of leaving a target alone. Q could almost hear the predictable dressing down the man would receive from his immediate superior before being returned to duty.

If Q smiles a little too broadly into his mug of tea at the thought his new bodyguard doesn’t notice.

He places the tea on the tall table beside his armchair and begins to read again.

The book isn’t holding his attention. It’s supposed to be some incredibly intelligent interrogation of innocence versus experience as told by possibly one of the most self-centered and universally disliked protagonists of 20th century literature. An absolute classic. Essential reading. A waste of time, Q concludes after reading another two pages.

He pushes his glasses up, a bad habit of his, and returns to one of his favourite hobbies of late: watching and judging the rotating cast of bodyguards.

This one is, incongruously, female. She has a non-descript pale face and drab shoulder-length brown hair. She looks tired and slightly bored as she sits quietly in the corner of the living room and Q notes that her eyes regularly sweep the entire expanse of the windowless room of books.  If she were concerned about hostiles she would keep her eyes trained on the door or on Q, the principal; a bad habit of hers, then.

“You’re used to working more public assignments, aren’t you?” Q asks idly as he places his book on the table and picks up the tea again.

“Yes, I am. How did you know?”

“Lucky guess,” Q lies. “It must be very hard, being female in your profession. I suppose they give you the public assignments because you blend in more easily; no one notices a woman in a crowd, particularly if the principal is female or young.”

“He told me you did that.”

“Who?”

“Bond.”

“Ah, Commander Bond. When will the esteemed naval-officer-cum-secret-intelligent-serviceman grace me with his presence again? I’ve not seen him in almost twenty four consecutive hours, is he no longer my primary guard or is he setting some sort of record?”

“Bond will relieve me at thirteen hundred hours,” the woman responds. “He is still your primary agent. There have been…developments in the case.”

“Developments? How intriguing,” Q responds as he snaps his book shut and launches himself out of the chair. “I am going to play now, please be quiet.”

The woman soundlessly got up from her chair and followed Q into the large living room. She didn’t bite back, or make any comment as Q settled down to run scales on the impressive black grand piano. She was completely silent and professional as she observed him.

At least he had something to look forward to now, Q thought as he shifted easily into playing a Passacaglia from memory. One o’clock could not come soon enough.

* * *

As the appointed hour draws closer Q digs out the sheet music for Mozart’s _Rondo Alla Turca_ and begins to play the fast tune with the ease that comes from several years of being guided into becoming a musical prodigy before his aptitude and love of mathematics had surfaced. The _Rondo_ is not Q’s favourite Mozart, he’s not a fan of the eleventh sonata in general, but it’s so popular and widely respected that he had mastered it when he was eleven to appease his tutor.

The _Rondo_ at least had the advantage of being simultaneously impressive and familiar to listeners.Q has been perfecting his artificial air of easy confidence since the incident; the _Rondo_ is the final layer in his carefully calculated presentation of himself.

It’s two days since Bond pulled him out of his en suite bathroom and only two hours until he is reunited with his estranged mother and forced to alter his life to accommodate the fact that apparently everyone in his family has a price on their head. He’s damned if he’s going to let it show. He’s had an entire decade to perfect his façade; it’s not going to fail him now.

At precisely one o’clock the agent’s phone rings to forewarn her of Bond’s imminent arrival.  Q begins the movement from the beginning so that the familiar allegretto will be just reaching a smooth crescendo when Bond enters.

At bar eight the agent moves to the door.

Bar twelve Q can hear the sound of them returning.

The door to the music room opens as Q begins to play bar fifteen. His timing was perfect.

“Ah, Bond. It’s so nice to -”

Q turns to smirk at the agent but he’s taken by surprise. He stops speaking. The music jars and falters. It seems to Q that all of the air has been sucked out as his careful façade falls away. He stands in silence, painfully aware of the three of them standing stiffly in the suddenly too small room.

“Hello, mother. I didn’t expect you so early.”

“Julian, it has been a while.”

* * *

There’s a crushing silence and Q’s dimly aware of being manipulated out of the room by the agent who had watched him that morning. He ends up seated in the dining room looking dumbly down at the tea that had been set before him. It’s english breakfast, made with too much milk and absolutely no sugar, Q doesn’t take his tea like this. Plus the mug’s wrong, it’s one of the cheaper white mugs and so it’s not ‘proper’ china which means it will cool considerably more quickly than it would if Q had made it.

Q doesn’t have the energy to make tea. He can’t even glare at it, just sits passively and mutely notes the faults in it.

He damns himself for not being prepared for this. It was all wrong. Whilst the _Rondo_ was perfect for James it was all wrong for his mother. His mother deserved _Moonlight Sonata_ and coolness, not the easy confidence that had been briefly present before he had sprung up and shattered at his mother’s unexpected arrival.

The others have come into the dining room now and Q spares them a glance before he focusses on his mug again. Bond takes the seat next to Q but carefully moves it back and further to the left before sitting down so that Q has more space. His mother will sit directly opposite now and next to her the  round face man with short, dark hair. He’s another Secret Intelligence Service member. Q thinks he must be higher up than Bond and the others. He holds himself differently, he’s more assured and pleasant than the others, he no longer has something to prove.

“Julian, my name is William Tanner. I am a Operational Administrator within the SIS, I’m going to be handling your case now that the situation has elevated.”

“Call me Q,” The boy replies dumbly staring the tea. The acidic tone he uses is gone, stripped bare by the unexpected appearance of his mother, to reveal a scared fourteen year old boy.

“Call me Bill then, if you’d like.”

“You can stop the caring sensitive stuff, _Bill_ , you’re crap at it.”

“Julian!”

“Sorry mother,” Q apologises on automatic, looking up to briefly meet her eye before glancing over at Tanner and Bond who are both smiling slightly at him. Q thinks Bond’s holding back laughter.

His confidence returns slightly. “Tanner, what are the developments?”

“Intelligence gathered from the attack on this property on Tuesday suggests the original motives for taking out your father aren’t  as simple as we thought. We believe that your father was assassinated in order to destabilise you, Q. The organisation intend to take you alive. A teenager with your obvious talents will be easy to train and manipulate.”

“They don’t want to kill me? They’re hoping the killing will inspire some twisted Stockholm syndrome in me that’ll make me more pliable?”

“Yes,” Bond replied shortly before being silenced by Tanner.

“Yes. You are not a target Q, but those protecting you are. We were hoping the transfer to the countryside with your mother would make you safer but now we’re reluctant to move you away from London and the SIS.”

“I can’t stay with him.” It’s the first time that Victoria Monahan has spoken indirectly about her son. It’s a bad habit of her’s, Q remembers, and it’s not surprising to see her make the easy shift into pretending he’s not really there. “I can’t leave Worcestershire.”

“Won’t,” Q corrected shortly as he drinks his tea. She doesn’t hear him.

“I understand Ms Monahan,” Tanner replied. “There are security implications with whichever decision you make. The service is prepared to leave the decision between Q and yourself. We can leave if you’d be more comfortable.”

“Please don’t, Tanner,” Q replies quickly. “I’d appreciate the opinion of Bond and yourself on the best way to ensure my safety.”

Bond, who showed no intention of leaving regardless of Tanner’s offer sinks slightly into his chair and smiles at Q. The teenager is at least somewhat more charming than his mother. Q offers a weak smile in return and shifts slightly so he’s angled slightly towards the confident agent.

“Whatever you decide, Q. You will be under my twenty - four hour surveillance. I’m on babysitting duty until the threat is neutralised.”

“Bond, careful. It almost seems like you care.”

“Not at all, Q”

“I’m sure. In fact, as an _exceptionally gifted_ person, I’ll guess that you asked to be assigned to gather intelligence instead. The service can’t have been too thrilled with you killing two men so I’m your...penance?”

“I like this one,” Tanner laughs. “That’s the situation, Q. Although the official line issued by the service is that Bond’s assigned to you to provide you with a sense of security and stability to make the likelihood of you wanting to leave minimal.”

“He exudes stability doesn’t he, Tanner? I feel _much_ safer now.”

“Glad we see eye to eye, Q.”

“Julian, you’re being rude,” Victoria admonished. “Mr Bond I hope the journey to Worcestershire won’t be too arduous for you. Julian, you’re packed, no? I want to leave as soon as possible.”

Q doesn’t hear her. “So, Bond. London?”

“London,” Bond replies shortly. Then, because Q seems slightly happier at the comment. “You might get to return to University as well - but I’d have to come to lectures with you.”

“You hate it. Did you hate maths?”

“Yes. I liked languages.”

“Everyone says maths is like languages.”

“It isn’t.” During the quick and easy interchange Q had turned fully in his chair to face Bond. Their voices had naturally dropped to a low, intimate conversation that was easily ignored by Victoria who was asking _Bill_ to be _wonderfully helpful_ and make the arrangements for travel to Worcestershire. If Q could hear her he would roll his eyes and sigh. He couldn’t, Q’s entire attention was fixed on Bond.

“What did you study?”

“Politics. I always favoured Classics.”

“Hmm,” Q looked appraisingly at the man. “I doubt you did much studying. Not with a figure like that.”

“No. I was expelled for sleeping with a girl at boarding school.”

“Of course you were.”

The easy conversation is cut away when Victoria pointedly demands if Q is ready to leave. Q notices the contrast. With Bond there’s a easy flow of conversation, banter and jokes coming naturally in his reassuring, anchoring presence. With Victoria, his mother, it’s sharp and biting, he feels like a helpless victim and can not outline why.

Q steels himself as he turns away from Bond’s microscopic smile to face his mother. “It’s safer to stay in London, Victoria. I’m going to stay here.” Q’s voice was level and steady, more genuine than any his facades as he calmly looked at his mother across the mahogany table. 

“Don’t be foolish Julian, go and pack. We’re leaving for Worcestershire today.”

“No.”

“Julian, I have a life in Worcestershire. I can’t leave it, you’re going to have to come with me.”

“You have a long-term boyfriend and job as an accountant. It’s a bit charitable to call that ‘a life’.”

“Julian, enough!” Victoria screamed. “Go and pack, now.”

“No.”

“Julian -”

“My name is Q, Victoria,” The boy yells as he stands up and pushes the chair backward sharply. He is gripped by an unstoppable wave of anger. James is reminded of Q screaming at him to ‘fuck off’. Everything came easily, except family. “Q, not Julian. _Q_. And I’m not leaving London. I don’t want to live in your semi-detached house in the country with your semi-attached homophobic boyfriend. I have a life in London, I’ve already been out of university for a week, you’re the one who wanted my education to continue.”

“I never wanted you to enter university so early,” Victoria snaps back surprised by the cool disdain her son was showing her. “Disagreement over your education was the reason your father and I divorced.”

“No it wasn’t! You divorced because he’d fucked his way through the secretarial pool at the bank and you knew that the divorce would work out for you. Don’t blame my condition for your divorce. You divorced because you were a shitty wife, he was a shitty husband and you were both shitty parents.”

“Julian-”

“No. Just - no, Victoria. Not anymore.” The boy looks deflated now as he steps slowly back from the table which had been supporting his weight through the confrontation with his mother. The anger had gone, replaced with a sense of detachment and weariness. He took a deep, shuddering breath. “Tanner, Bond, I will be staying in London for the duration. Please escort Victoria from the premise and ensure she gets back to Worcestershire safely.”

* * *

Q does play the Moonlight Sonata then. He shuts the door to the music room on Bond and the agent is wise enough not to force the lock.

He plays. There’s a familiar melancholy to the tune, the underlying and repetitive

melody created with his right hand is somehow sadder than the slow, deep notes he holds with his left. The repetition reminds Q that this is all there is. It’s the same old argument with eventually the same reconciliation, the same unsatisfactory conclusion.

The notes resonate through the room. The notes and the music are all that Q controls. everything else in his life is predetermined, fixed and set like flat notation on the regimented staves. Q can play a flat note, or change the tune, hold the pedal too long or stop playing altogether. Q can change the music but he can’t change the notes. He can’t change his life either.

He plays the notes as written. His control is illusory.

* * *

Bond waits outside the door to the music room. There’s little he can do but he’s reluctant to leave his charge again. Tanner had escorted Ms Monahan away to conclude the business. Q was officially placed under the care and protection of the Service.

The sonata ends and begins again.

Bond slumps then slides down so that he’s seated on the floor with his back against the heavy wood of the door. He’s stuck with Q now, and the boy’s stuck with him.

The sonata ends and begins again. Bond doesn’t move.

 


End file.
